The elitist gun control proponents do not live in the real world

Friday, February 22, 2013

By GERALD K. McOSCARGuest Columnist

I smile each time Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter or Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, President Obama, Vice President Biden, or Hollywood celebrity use a Sandy Hook-like tragedy to urge stricter gun control.

The joke on the rest of us of course is that by happy coincidence cops are armed, politicians spend their days cocooned in office buildings with restricted access, metal-detectors, and security cameras, and celebrity-types reside safely ensconced in gated communities. When they do come out to play, most have muscle in the entourage.

It’s been well said that a person cannot be reasoned out of believing that which he has not reasoned himself into. For example, an anti-gun person once told me she did not believe in the Second Amendment because guns scared her. Emotion-based beliefs are impervious to reason, logic or facts.

The reason many activists are instinctively anti-gun is because they cannot emphasize with average Americans. Theirs is a world far removed from the real world where the striving masses live, work, play, and “cling to their guns and religion.”

In the real world, “When seconds count,” the reality is that most times, “police are minutes away.” But in the real world, minutes count.

In the real world, on the evening of Jan. 15 a homeowner in Philadelphia’s Powelton Village section fatally shot a 44-year- old man breaking into his house. The intruder was armed with a shovel.

The following morning a retired Camden police officer working as a security guard at a Camden check cashing business shot and killed a 19-year-old man who broke down a brick wall with the help of an accomplice in an apparent attempt to rob the business. When the intruder rushed the security guard with gun raised, the guard fired.

In the real world, police would have arrived on the scenes with two innocent people dead and the perpetrators on the lam.

Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. Illinois’s complete prohibition on the carrying of firearms in public for the purpose of self-defense has been ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court. Yet Chicago’s homicide count eclipsed 500 last year. January’s murder rate is outpacing 2012’s. Seven people were killed and six wounded in gun violence on Saturday the 26th alone.

Unwilling or unable to confront fatherless homes, the appeal of a culture of violence, and the easy money of the drug trade, the Chicago establishment is calling for even stricter gun control despite irrefutable evidence that past measures have utterly failed to stem the violence ( and may actually contribute to the carnage by disarming law abiding citizens).

President Obama is urging immediate passage of a new Federal Assault Weapons Ban, originally passed in 1994, which expired in 2004. Yet, a National Institute of Justice 1997 study concluded that “the evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect ( i.e., that the effect was different from zero.” A 2004 followup study concluded, “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

Yet the drum beat continues.Why?

Because, rhetoric aside, many gun control proponents are but distant cousins of the same elitists and organizations the Second Amendment was written to protect “we the people” from.

(Gerald K. McOscar is an attorney in West Chester and an occasional guest columnist to the Opinion Page.)